A recent study by Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism highlights a major problem with AI-powered search engines: their inability to provide reliable answers. More than 60% of news queries reportedly receive incorrect answers, a rate that climbs to 67% for some tools. D
Growing popularity, but at what cost?
AI-powered search engines are attracting an ever-widening audience. In the United States, a quarter of Internet users now use them as an alternative to traditional search engines. However, these tools do not yet offer the guarantee of verified and contextualized information.
The study analyzed eight different artificial intelligence platforms capable of responding to queries in real time. The results are clear: none of these systems is capable of avoiding systematic errors. Worse, when they don't have reliable information, these models don't know how to refrain and prefer to generate an approximate answer, giving the illusion of certainty.
Persistent errors and misleading quotes
To measure the extent of the phenomenon, the researchers submitted excerpts from journalistic articles to the AIs, asking them to identify the title, publisher, publication date, and URL. The result? These tools generated misleading references, with broken or fabricated links.
Search systems like Gemini and Grok 3 are particularly affected. More than one in two citations led to an incorrect URL or a syndicated page, often on platforms like Yahoo News, to the detriment of the publisher's original site. A lack of transparency that worries industry professionals.
Publishers dispossessed of their own content
Publishers lose control over how their content is interpreted and displayed. While artificial intelligence has the potential to improve access to information, its reliability poses a fundamental problem.
The results of this study are a clear signal: AI-based news search engines absolutely must improve their information validation mechanism, otherwise they risk causing a real crisis of confidence. Because when it comes to news, inaccurate information can do more damage than no information at all.
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